Building the sustainable business of consumer trust

MEF’s fourth Annual Consumer Trust Summit was recently held in in New York, where mobile privacy experts, MEF members and guests met to discuss the business critical issue of consumer trust and privacy. MEF CEO Rimma Perelmuter opened the event, and here offers a call to action for the industry to address the growing need to build trust & empower mobile consumers via the next phase in MEF’s Consumer Trust initiative. Last month I was delighted to open MEF’s Consumer Trust Summit in New York. Our fourth annual event this year was co-located with Momentum’s Business of Privacy Summit and …

Spies like U.S. – Law enforcement agencies and your data

Are law enforcement agencies infiltrating servers to steal customer data? And, if so, what can we do about it? Simon Bates, MEF’s Senior Advisor for Policy & Initiatives details the steps you can take to protect your personal data. We all know how valuable data is to apps companies – many business models are based around sharing consumers’ personal information with advertisers and other third parties. In return, the app is often heavily discounted so, as long as the developer is sensitive to privacy concerns, everyone wins. However, people are waking up to the fact that there might be …

What’s the Deal with Adware on Android?

In most cases, the “free” Android applications you download from Google’s Play store aren’t free at all. These developers aren’t just developing apps for you out of the kindness of their collective hearts. Like most online services that don’t ask for the traditional up-front payment, the mobile application profit-model relies on advertising and in-app purchases.  Kaspersky Lab Mobile expert Brian Donohue explores the android app ecosystem . During the development process, whoever is building an application will often choose some third party ad library and bundle it into their app. Once an …

An Android that robbed your bank account

It was predicted, it was feared, and the day has come.  An Android Trojan that has the ability to steal money from bank accounts has emerged in Russia. Kaspersky Lab Mobile expert, Serge Malenkovich takes a closer look, and shares top tips to avoid falling foul of the cyber-criminals. We have discussed all of the dangers posed by potential smartphone viruses. Your smartphone contains private and financial data, valuable to cybercriminals. Nevertheless, most “commercially-oriented” Android malware steals from users by sending text messages to premium-rate numbers. Although unpleasant, this …

The Perils of Securing the Computer in Your Pocket

If computers themselves are relatively new in the grand scheme of things, then mobile devices are incredibly new. And likewise, just as we’ve spent the better part of the last two or three decades figuring out how to secure the traditional computer, there is probably a long road ahead for mobile security as well. Kaspersky Lab Mobile expert Brian Donohue takes a look at some fundamental steps to ensuring your mobile device is secure. Smartphones and tablets have everything and more than the personal computer, which represents a security challenge in and of itself. More problematically though, …